1. Field
Exemplary embodiments of the inventive concept relate to an I2C router system. More particularly, exemplary embodiments of the inventive concept relate to an I2C router system capable of improving a quality of a data communication using an I2C interface protocol.
2. Description of the Related Art
An I2C interface protocol is a data communication protocol for communicating between general-purpose circuits such as memory devices and LCD drivers.
An I2C bus is a bi-directional 2-wire bus or a bi-directional 3-wire bus. Devices which support the I2C bus embed the I2C bus interface and communicate with each other by the I2C interface protocol, via the I2C bus.
The I2C bus allows integrated circuits to communicate directly with each other via a simple bi-directional 2-wire bus. A device is connected to each of the two wires on the bus. One (SDA) of two wires is for the communication of data and the other (SCL) of two wires is for the control and synchronization of the communication of data between the devices.
Each device that is connected to the I2C bus is identifiable by a unique address, and may operate as either a transmitter or a receiver, or both. Data are transferred using a master-slave protocol. A master device initiates a data transfer and generates clock signals to permit the transfer. A slave device is addressed for this transfer.
The data transfer may be initiated by the master device to transmit data to the slave device (write) or to request data from the slave device (read). A particular device may be a master device, a slave device, or both (master/slave). For example, an output device such as a display panel is typically not able to initiate a data transfer, and therefore would be configured to only operate as the slave device.
An I2C bus may be connected to an external master device to control an initial value of the slave device or to debug a system.
When a plurality of master/slave devices are connected to a plurality of slave devices via one I2C bus, operation signals of master/slave devices may be sequentially transmitted to the slave devices via the one I2C bus. Thus, total communication time between the master/slave devices and the slave devices increases and connection load of the I2C bus increases. In addition, quality of data transfer decreases.
When the master/slave devices and the slave devices are connected via plural I2C buses to decrease the connection load of the I2C buses, wires of an inner system and wires between the system and the external master device increase.